Movie News & Reviews

“BlacKkKlansman,” from Spike Lee and KU professor Kevin Willmott, won the Grand Prix award at Cannes Film Festival. It tells the true story of a black cop who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan, with parallels to David Duke and Charlottesville, Virginia.

"You'll Never Walk Alone" will be a hit this weekend from Kiev, where Liverpool supporters will sing it before the Champions League final, to Broadway, where Renee Fleming is starring in a Tony Award-nominated revival of "Carousel".

There's too much "Star Wars." A new "Star Wars" movie five months after the previous "Star Wars" movie – whether it's "Solo: A Star Wars Story" or "Kenobi: A Star Wars Story" or "Star Wars: The New Jedi After the Last Jedi" – is too much "Star Wars." I say that as a lifelong, 40-plus-years true believer. Anticipation is as much a part of "Star Wars" as Stormtroopers. Memo to Lucasfilm: Make "Star Wars" a holiday event, a seasonal treat, an annual happening, out of your life long enough to allow us to miss it.

AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR. 2.5 stars. A heaping 156-minute plate of plot spaghetti, as superheroes and supervillains chase six objects across time and space in a bid to control ultimate power in the universe. Just enough moments of humor to keep things watchable, but the movie is overcrowded with Avengers (Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chadwick Boseman, and others) and subplots and the movie feels like a comedown after Black Panther. 2 hrs. 36 PG-13 (language) – Gary Thompson

"On Chesil Beach" would be an uncomfortable sit even if director Dominic Cooke's film version of the Ian McEwan novella had figured out an effective tone and style for these clammy little scenes from a repressed, thwarted marriage. What worked on the page, more or less, struggles on screen, however, even though (and maybe because) McEwan adapted his own 2007 story.

"A life without despair is a life without hope," says the man at the center of Paul Schrader's "First Reformed." That paradox embraces the world as it is, and suggests a better world for the making. The movie it belongs to is an act of spiritual inquiry, a coolly assured example of cinematic scholarship in subtly deployed motion and one of the strongest pictures of 2018.